Motorola is trying to capture a lead in the fast-paced, highly competitive smartphone race, and it's doing so by further developing Moto Mods, the company's own unique approach on smartphone modularity.
To that end, Motorola recently held a pitch event for budding investors and hardware designers to tell a panel of Motorola, Lenovo, and Verizon executives what Moto Mod accessory they'd like to make. If it's a hit with the panelists, they'll fund it.
The spate of ideas, thirteen in total, are a conflation of interesting concepts: one's an extended battery with a solar charger, another's an LED light ring for notifications, and there's even a physical QWERTY keyboard.
But Motorola, Lenovo, and Verizon only ended up plucking two winning concepts from the pile: the Digiframe, which snaps an always-on e-paper display on the back of your smartphone, and the MACAY TrueSound HiFi, which adds an analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converter for higher-quality audio playback on your phone. The two concepts are interesting in such a way that they target different components: visual and sound.
Moto Mods Pitch: Digiframe
Digiframe is described as an "always on sticky note that's synced to your Moto Z." The screen provides the information you need most often: weather forecast, traffic updates, calendar events, and more.
Digiframe is exactly like the Yotaphone 2, which also features an e-paper display on the back for e-reader purposes, in addition to doubling as a notifications panel.
Moto Mods Pitch: MACAY TrueSound HiFi
To get true high-quality sound, you need a few things, and they can be expensive: high-quality audio, preferably ripped from a CD; a digital audio converter; and high-quality headphones. The makers of MACAY TrueSound HiFi know that, and they aim to snap a digital-to-analog converter and analog-to-digital converter on any Moto Z phone for it to output high-quality audio. With it, the only things you'll need are a pair of great-sounding cans and high-quality audio files.
Moto Mods Accelerator Program
But the two Moto Mods mentioned above aren't the only ones getting support. Several other ideas will also be developed further. The other concepts, in addition to the winning ideas, will all be enrolled in the Moto Mods Accelerator Program, which will guide all the participants in development from start to finish.
Among the participants are a Moto Mod that features a wireless charging panel and an IR blaster, all in the thinness of a Style Shell; a physical QWERTY keyboard add-on; an LED light ring that'll glow when a notification arrives; and a solar-powered charger.
All the ideas are interesting in their own right, but more than that, it's also interesting to see that Motorola is pushing for physical add-ons to be the next big thing for smartphones. When LG did it with the G5, it failed, but mostly because the ecosystem was limited. With Moto Mods, the ecosystem is very open.
Motorola wants its user base to become fluent in the language of modularity, and it has to hope that opening Moto Mods up to developers will only spell great things in the long run.
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